Pará has the least sustainable cities in Brazil and SP, the most; see ranking

Of the 10 cities with the worst sustainable performance in Brazil, 8 are in the Amazon region — more precisely in the states of Pará and Amazonas.

This is what the IDSC (Sustainable Development Index for Cities) shows, a tool launched this Friday (8) to monitor regional engagement with the theme.

The initiative was created by the ICS (Sustainable Cities Institute) and evaluates the performance of all 5,570 municipalities. With that, Brazil becomes the first country in the world to do this monitoring, according to the institute.

The ranking uses the SDGs as criteria, which are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals prepared by the UN in 2015. It is a global call to face the main challenges facing humanity, such as reducing inequality, protecting the planet and promoting peace and of prosperity.

Based on a methodology created by the United Nations, the IDSC assigns a score to each municipality, calculated based on public data. Among the 100 indicators observed are carbon emissions, families enrolled in social programs, infant mortality, internet access in schools, and gender pay inequality.

Each variable is transformed into a score, which is used to calculate the final score, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the value, the better the performance.

Santana do Araguaia, in Pará, is the city with the worst indicators in the country (30.10). One of the factors that weighed the most on the grade was schooling. Only 8.8% of young people up to 19 years of age have completed high school. In addition, the municipality has a femicide rate of 17.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, with a reference value of 1 per 100,000.

The results point to regional disparities already known in the Brazilian reality. All the 100 municipalities with the worst performance, for example, are in the North and Northeast regions of the country. In addition, the three capitals with the lowest score are in the Legal Amazon.

Macapá is the last capital in the ranking (40.17). Only 37% of the population receives drinking water supply, and the proportion of illiterates aged 15 and over is 6.17%, double the target (3%).

Despite the numbers, income inequality in Macapá is better than in São Paulo, which had the best performance among the capitals (62.06).

The highlights were the indicators of drinking water supply (99.3% of the population is served) and selective collection (79%), in addition to the health budget.

São Caetano do Sul is in 1st place

While 43 of the 100 worst ranked cities are in the state of Pará, the ten best are concentrated in the state of São Paulo.

São Caetano do Sul was the city that presented the best ODS indicators, with 100% of the population served with drinking water supply and selective collection.

São Paulo does not have any municipality with a very low level of development. Only five are below the national average.

Good grade can hide problems

Being at the top of the rankings is not necessarily a certificate of excellence. The index also makes it possible to see the performance of municipalities in each SDG, shedding light on problems that may be hidden by a good grade.

Analyzing SDG 10, for example, which concerns the reduction of inequalities, there are weaknesses even among the best placed on the list.

The first place in the ranking, São Caetano do Sul, has a Gini coefficient (an indicator that measures inequality in income distribution) of 0.54, which indicates greater asymmetry —the UN target for the indicator is, at most, is 0.3. In São Paulo, the value is even higher: 0.62.

The worst ranking among Brazilian cities in this index is São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM), with 0.8. By way of comparison, Namibia is the country with the worst score in the world (0.7), still better than the city of Amazonas.

On the IDSC website, it is possible to research the performance of all 5,570 Brazilian municipalities.

According to Instituto Cidades Sustentáveis, the tool intends to generate a movement of transformation in municipal public management.

The intention is to guide the action of mayors and mayors in the sense of defining goals based on indicators and facilitating the monitoring of the SDGs at the local level.